My wife and I recently added our first child into the world and decided to breast feed. With breast feeding comes pumping and storing breast milk for later use for the baby. My wife refers to our stored milk as “liquid gold”, it’s a major time and convenience commitment to do it properly. As with any milk, breast milk has a short shelf life so freezing is necessary.

We also live in an area where a lot of the power that comes to our house comes in through above ground lines, so when there is inclement weather we are at risk of short to long power outages. The freezer is inherited from my parents. I don’t know exactly how old it is, but it’s running! I’m sure its days are numbered.

So all of this leaves us in a constant state of worry about our freezer storing this precious commodity. Is there power at the house? Is our freezer dead? IS THE MILK OK?

The old phrase “crying over spilled milk” has never made as much sense as it does now.

M2M has been used in several innovative products. In the past, M2M has used RFID tags on runners to analyze and monitor their heath. Now, M2M is being used on babies with the new Exmobaby onesies.

Exmovere created the Exmobaby pajama with bio-sensor fabric. It contains a small receiver equipped with a Zigbee tranceiver to give parents updates about their infant via cell phone or computer. Using these innovative onesies, parents are now able to monitor their infant’s health, emotional state, behavior, and heart rate. The Exmobaby is extremely useful for parents who are worried about their baby being at risk for sleep apnea or sudden infant death syndrome.

This new technology will also be convenient when either parent is out of the house. In addition, if the infant is with a babysitter, parents can still monitor what is going on with their baby. With M2M technology, Exmovere has made regular baby monitors seem like a thing of the past.

I’m a new parent with an infant and I find this very interesting. I’m probably not the target market, but for the casual parent I think this is a little overkill. I’m also not sure of the cost of one of those super monitoring onesies. If you have a dozen of them with all the hardware in them, do you have to sync up which one is on? What about washing them? I think the products like the baby sensor mats they have today are over the top. We have a basic wireless sound monitor, that does just fine.

After talking to my wife who is a NICU nurse, she thought it was a great idea… If it works. She said today, babies with issues often go home with sensor leads on them. These are not the most ideal as they can easily fall off and are subject to frequent false positive alarms. I’m sure that market is decently sized on it’s own and could have a real application, I just don’t see it making “regular baby monitors seem like a thing of the past” as they said.

This article really brought to light something I haven’t thought about: Are businesses really in the business of job creation?

In my experience running a small consulting business and a small brick and mortar business. My answer is NO.

In my eyes creating jobs is a secondary benefit. (Some may not even see it as a benefit at all, as I’m sure some could do without dealing and managing people. But that’s a different conversation for a different day.) I’m not discounting the fact that creating jobs is a good thing. It is a good feeling to help out another and have them help out the business along the way. I think hiring is mostly seen a filling a need and demand where there is work to be done in a business. The primary objective of most businesses is the bottom line. If it’s not making money it’s not as important.

When you are creating technology and innovation you are often targeting how to do more with less. How can I replace a manual process (where some people have jobs) and automate it through technology? My ideal company of my own creation would be to invent some huge value add technology apply it to an existing market, charge money and it requires ZERO support and maintenance. Then I could rake in large amounts of money and hire a minimum amount of people, thus increasing my profits and not deal with managing anyone.

Ask any brick and mortar company: If the business could make the same amount of money and not have employees, would they do it? My guess would be yes.